Formatting a drive is enough to prevent confidential data outflow?

[adi]

Recently, i bought a new external hard drive and now it's not working fine. Since last two days, it hangs whenever i try to store data. I tried several methods to make it healthy again but nothing worked for me. Now i finally decide to replace it and before sending it for replacement i formatted the drive to prevent confidential data outflow. Now i wanted to confirm is it safe now ?
 

[Tx Redneck]

Hey @adi and

 

To be as certain as one can be, you could encrypt the the drive, then format it again. That would ensure any data that may have been recoverable should be sufficiently destroyed. 

 

Tx

[TomU]

Does formatting an encrypted drive make it unrecoverable ?  

[Tx Redneck]

As I recall, the encryption scrambles any data and thus would require the key to decrypt it and formatting furthers the destruction since you're not intending to decrypt.

[TomU]

That cool.  This is something i wasn't aware off. Year back when i was in need of data erasing i downloaded a tool name as bitraser for file and wiped the entire drive.

[Tomk_]

You still can as Bitraser still exists... or you can use a free tool called bleachbit.

[MdouglasFTech]

Agreed with the top posters. Using TPM and a good hardware encryption like McAfee will definetly render your storage media unreadable by anyone without the cypher. Gov-grade 0 bit wiping is icing on the cake.

 

Of course, dunking it in bleach or Ammonia also works.....

 

Best of luck

Edited November 23, 2019 by MdouglasFTech